Anecdote in the Swiss Alps

         Setting: The Hotel Arosa, in German Switzerland. Easter Skiing Season. It is dinner time. My family waits for me in the little anteroom just before the dining room. I am in a water closet on the first floor hall, having pulled up the plunger on the commode. This machine is infernal to an American because instead of having an activating handle on the front of the tank, it has a plastic disc on the top. The device seems to invite a downward pressing palm motion to work the toilet, but, actually, one must lift it. I have been frequently confused between pressing and pulling the disc top.Now, after once again pushing or pressing it falsely, I over-correct myself and pull it up sharply. I do so too violently, however, and break it off. To my consternation the disc top flies right out of my hand and caroms off one wall and the ceiling above. It bounces down directly into the toilet bowl, whose seat is still up. Before my startled eyes it disappears in the whorl of flushed water eddying out of the bowl.

In the ensuing silence that beats on my eardrums, I find myself staring incredulously at my handiwork….But who is to know whodunnit? Either more cowardly than embarrassed, or more audacious than either, I quickly leave the scene of the crime. The concatenation of events still boggles my mind: my wrong initial movement, my impatient recovery and over-reaction, my fascination and paralysis at the quick course of subsequent events, demonstrating the immutable old law of gravitation or the unearthly new principle of magnetism between plastic and descending water.

Incident on the Clark Fork

      It had taken fifteen memorable minutes—from the time she was hooked, that is. Before that, he must have used four night crawlers, which she kept stripping off. He could feel her each time, big and emboldened with each success. He was just as good at bait fishing as fly fishing and he could not believe, with how cunningly he threaded the crawler on the hook the fourth time, that she would get away with it, but she did. He preferred fly fishing, but this early in the season on the delta’d but highwater Clark Fork, he fished bait the first part of the day. There was an art to it, which fly-men denigrated too easily because of the majority of lazy bums who practiced it grossly. But he had been taught better, by an expert who showed him precisely how to bounce a No. 3 split shot on the bottom so that it entered a hole repercussively; then you let the hook dribble, and, afterwards, lie and drift: it would generally be hit just then.